affinity designer Xmas Tree drawing animation

[v_kyr]

Being in Greece recently for the last two winter months (...well no need to ask it's nicely warmer over there 😉), I saw people there starting very early on November to decorate their gardens, balcons ... etc. for Xmas. - One of the neighbors had in his garden an interesting - sequence blinking rain-fall like lighting - applied outside on his xmas-tree, which looked quite good at nights. This inspired me to try to build some sort of an xmas tree animation from a vector drawing.

I've kept my initial ADe vector drawing as simple as possible, since I didn't wanted to spend overall too much time on it. Thus I just reused one of my latest available silhouette xmas tree assets for the tree drawing etc. ...

... and gave the vector drawing partly just a quick pseudo 3D touch ...

... the more interesting part (at least for me here) is to save/export enough single tree light state images, so I can vary these when creating/stiching some animated GIF or MP4 video together out of the single images. - Here's a quick single one time run (no looping yet) of 14 behind each other state images:

Now I've to play with variations, looping, duplications and timings of images, in order to try out more and different blinking/flow lighting effects! 🤔

 

[dannyg9]

Love it. Knowing next to nothing about creating animation, the only suggestion I can think of is to highlight bits of the boy that are facing the tree when it's fully lit and blinking. That's a minor detail I suppose. Overall though it's very well executed and I love the style.

[v_kyr]

50 minutes ago, dannyg9 said:

Knowing next to nothing about creating animation

It's easy, at least for creating animated GIFs, all you have to do is to save/export several continiously changed drawing parts (aka image states) and then combine the single images together with some software where you can optional define the image order & time delay between shown images. - For the above shown anim GIF I've used ImageMagick's convert tool in a terminal, to stich the images together.

Quote

convert -delay 50 bild13.png bild1.png bild2.png bild3.png bild4.png bild5.png bild6.png bild7.png bild8.png bild9.png bild10.png bild11.png bild12.png bild13.png bild14.png out.gif

 

1 hour ago, dannyg9 said:

...the only suggestion I can think of is to highlight bits of the boy that are facing the tree when it's fully lit and blinking.

Good point & hint, thanks!